In driving innovation, business leaders are now scrutinizing every aspect of the organisation to find efficiencies and cost savings. This includes re-engineering inefficient business models.
Business leaders have recognized that, in the distributed work environment, the key to success is ensuring the technology used across all business functions is compatible, and maintains the integrity of the organisation’s data and applications, regardless of access location. This has brought multi-cloud applications to the fore in driving more innovative business models.
However, as organisations implement cloud applications that help drive innovation while sustaining business operations, it is critical to ensure the organisational security posture is maintained to mitigate the increasing risk of cyber-attacks
How cloud security impacts business innovation
The plethora of online applications and platforms that organisations are using now is just the tip of the iceberg. The future of business relies on the ability to pivot, scale and rapidly redeploy resources and new business applications. To achieve this, organisations are increasingly depending on a multi-cloud approach that encompasses two or more of the following:
- Public hosted clouds where the cloud provider protects the infrastructure and the user is responsible for securing their own applications and data hosted on the cloud
- Private cloud environments that are used for one single organisation, which directly manages (or hires a third party to manage) and secures all aspects of the private cloud
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that is managed and delivered by a third party. This includes software for office applications, database management, accounting, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning.
While cloud applications provide a highly effective way for organisations to store data and collaborate on new projects in a distributed work environment, as more new ideas are brought to market, the value of intellectual property will continue to soar. This makes organisations prime targets for cyber-attacks.
Cloud environments increase an organisation’s attack surface, so it requires security that can keep up with the agility and flexibility of these environments. To effectively monitor events in the cloud, visibility throughout the network must be available, not just for one isolated cloud.
Key challenges for cloud security
A new study revealed that hackers attack every 39 seconds on average. Despite the increasing risk of targeted cyberattacks, organisations are still willing to take the risk on unsecured cloud applications and platforms.
A recent IHSMarkit global survey of 350 enterprises found that organisations continue to move forward with risky cloud deployments because they support key business goals, help meet customer demand, or directly generate revenue.
For those organisations that aim to protect their intellectual property with cloud security, the use of multiple cloud vendors often results in different cloud platforms, applications, integrations, and, typically, a disparate collection of security products. This makes it difficult to monitor what’s happening across all the clouds, properly manage risk, address regulatory compliance, and maintain consistent security policies.
Delivering a secure, integrated cloud that supports business innovation
To future-proof business operations and protect intellectual property, organisations need an integrated and automated security platform that provides visibility and centralised management and reporting across all cloud applications. Nexon’s approach helps cover security gaps that are created by the deployment of additional cloud applications and platforms.
An integrated cyber security platform approach is one that delivers transparent visibility, policies, and controls across the entirety of the cloud attack surface, down to the virtual traffic layer. It lets organisations scale cloud security to align with new business applications through comprehensive email, application, endpoint, perimeter and access security solutions.
Organisations have now generally accepted that the digital economy is the new reality, and more employees will continue to work outside of the protection of the traditional corporate firewall than within. Therefore, integrated, cloud-based security solutions are the future in empowering organisations to focus on building their resilience in a dynamic market through innovation, while having peace of mind that they are protected with real-time integrated security across their entire cloud network.
To find out more about a best practice approach for integrating security into your clouds contact Nexon today.
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